Daniel Dennett's Most Useful Critical Thinking Tools

Mistakes are opportunities for learning and for creating something truly new.

And the trick for making good mistakes is not trying to hide them. Be honest with yourself and really know your own mistakes, so that you learn from them and that you'll never repeat them.

It's a mode of argumentation or a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd conclusion. 

Take an assertion and see if you can inquire about any contradictions out of it. If you can, that proposition has to be discarded.

1. Re-express your target’s position so clearly and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2. List any points of agreement.
3. Mention anything that you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

The main idea: Don't fabricate a complicated theory when you have a simpler one that handles a phenomenon just as well.

It describes the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another.

It stands for “jumping out of the system.”It can be applied to science, philosophy, and arts.

Being creative is not about searching for something new, but about making the novelty jump out of some system, a system that has become somewhat established, for good reasons.

Often the world “surely” is as good as a blinking light in locating a weak point in the argument.

Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about